Clicks and impressions

Tips to increase traffic to your site

Some of the best strategies you can use to drive users to your site and improve the visibility of your pages can be found within Google's Search Console. We've highlighted five ways you can take advantage of the tools below to improve the visibility of the content you've worked hard to create.

1. Submit all of your pages to the Google index - for free.

By using Google Search Console to submit your URLs, you help Google's web crawler do a more complete and efficient job of crawling your site. Search Console enables you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, and it's particularly useful for making sure that we know about all dynamically generated URLs or pages that are not adequately linked to on your site. But please note: submitting a page to the index will not guarantee inclusion or influence your PageRank, and isn't a replacement for creating compelling and useful content.

2. Find out how Google sees your site.

Once you've made sure we have access to your site, you can see the common words used to link to your pages and that are seen by Google. This allows you to see trends in your site's content, and can help you determine why you may be ranking for particular keywords. You can also see which page has the highest PageRank by month. Some site owners are surprised to find that this isn't always the home page. If an internal page has the highest PageRank, you might consider spending more time optimizing the ads there.

3. Diagnose potential problems.

We let you know if, and why, we're having trouble accessing your site or specific pages. If we can't crawl a page, we can't index it -- so fixing any errors we list can help improve your overall coverage. If some of your pages block MediaPartners-Google (the AdSense crawler), you can use the robots.txt analysis tool of Google Search Console to test changes to that file and make sure those changes allow crawler access. You can also see what pages you are blocking from other Google bots -- this lets you experiment with changes to see how they would affect the crawl of your site.

4. Find out which queries drive traffic to your site.

Using Google Search Console, learn which Google queries created clickthroughs to your site and where you were positioned in the search results for that query. You can also view data for individual properties and countries as well. For instance, you can see the queries from users searching Google Images in the United States that returned your site in the results. You'll only see properties and countries for which your site has data.

5. Get re-included.

If your site has disappeared from the search results, read through the Google quality guidelines, then correct any problems on your site and request re-inclusion from your Google Search Console account. Please keep in mind that the reinclusion request form is only available to people using Google Search Console.